The Power Rankings are an analysis of the 2017 season. The halfway point of the season seems like a good point to do a quick review.

View the current Power Rankings.On the mens’ side, Paul McBeth (97.5) and Ricky Wysocki (96.1) have a comfortable lead over Nate Sexton (90.1), Simon Lizotte (88.6) and Cale Leiviska (88.4), who round out the top five.On the womens’ side, Paige Pierce (98.2) is setting an insane pace. Catrina Allen (87.7) and Sarah Hokom (85.1) are in a relatively tight battle for the second spot.After the Tour Championship, we will be able to announce our 2017 Player of the Year, which will be the player that has the highest winning percentage against quality players at premier events. The Power Rankings value all Premier Events and only weight events based on the number of Quality Players at each event. PDGA Majors, Pro Tour, National Tour and World Tour events, as well as select A and B Tiers are all included.———-How Players QualifyMPO

PDGA rating of 1000 or above, we define these players as MPO Quality Players

Premier events are events with 8 or more MPO Quality Players. Only premier events are utilized.

Be among the top 50 in Qualifying Points (10*#Events + 1*#Quality Players competed against)

Top 25, ranked by win percentage, are included in the Power Rankings

FPO

PDGA rating of 870 or above, we define these players as FPO Quality Players

Premier events are events with 4 or more FPO Quality Players. Only premier events are utilized.

Be among the top 30 in Qualifying Points (10*#Events + 1*#Quality Players competed against)

Each year, as the rating of the 144th rated PDGA player changes, the necessary PDGA rating to be included will also change.

Note: For the women, we utilize a different number with a goal of growing to the 144th rated female player as the women’s field continues to grow.

——–Now that we have our players and events defined, we get down to brass tacks. A straight up “I beat you so I’m better than you” mentality is what we are going for. We only care about wins and losses against Quality Players. For example, if you play in an event with 21 Quality Players and get 5th relative to the Quality Players in the event, your win/loss record at the event would be 16 wins to 4 losses.Note: Any players with a rating below 1000 would not be counted in the win column.——–Other ranking systems put false weight on various events. We believe that what makes a Quality Event, for the purposes of ranking players, is simply the number of Quality Players at the event. If an event has 20 Quality Players and you win it, you are 19 & 0. If an event has 10 Quality Players and you win it, you are 9 & 0. Rather than using a false multiplier for events, which puts a human’s natural bias on it, we utilize a system that relies solely on the number of Quality Players at the event. More Quality Players at an event means the event is more important in the rankings.To put this into context, the Aussie Open, a PDGA Major, is barely included in our Power Rankings. The event had eight players rated 1000 or above. In the PDGA Ranking system, McBeth gets big points for this win since it is a Major. We feel this “Major” win only warrants McBeth to a record of 7 & 0. His win at The Memorial Championship was much more consequential to the much larger field of Quality Players.Similarly, in 2015, there were ten EuroTour events included in the DGWT Rankings. Several of these events had zero Quality Players and the largest had nine. We will not include these events until there is more maturation in the quality of players. Including these events will skew the rankings towards players that play in Europe, as they will get points for top finishes at these events, even though there is little to no Quality competition.——–There are many different ways to rank players in individual sports. The PDGA and DGWT use systems that artificially weight “big events” and give points to players for their finishes at these events. The points earned are independent of the number of Quality Players at the events, some of which actually have none. The PDGA also adds in a PDGA Rating factor, which is biased towards players that compete in premier events. These systems have inherent flaws due to the event and rating bias that naturally infiltrates them.From our perspective, the players that attend an event define how great it is. An arbitrary label (Major, NT, A, B, C) cannot accurately define the quality of the players at an event. Additionally, a player’s performance against other Quality Players is the best measure of how they should be ranked.There have been many iterations of our rankings and they have coalesced into this system, which may morph even more over the coming decade. While our sport is still young and the top tier of events are still being defined, this system, with its fluid benchmarks and qualifications, is the ideal ranking system moving forward. Let us know your thoughts.Visit the Rankings page every Tuesday for the updated Pro Tour Power Rankings.